take thy coat also." Our answer to this is, that this diversity can no longer form a ground of objection, because the two sentences were spoken at different periods of time.

But we may add,-because the remark may also apply to several other objections of the same nature,—that, even if it were true that the two sentences in question might be quoted as the same fragment of the same sermon, the difference between them would not cause us the slightest astonishment. We believe that the Holy Ghost, when quoting himself, is not restricted to the use of the same terms, provided that he preserves the same sense. When a man of accurate mind repeats or quotes his own writings, he does not in anywise feel compelled to preserve the identity of the phrase thus far. And we judge, in the case before us, that the mind of our Lord is equally expressed in these two sentences of Luke and Matthew.

ANOTHER SOURCE OF RASH CONCLUSIONS.-The import of certain features in a narrative is not comprehended, and the conclusion is eagerly come to that the author is in fault.

FIRST EXAMPLE.-Jesus, in St. Matthew (xxiii. 35, 36), denounces the Jews on account of their treatment of his saints, and threatens them with the most terrible judgments of God; "that (he remarks) upon this race (or generation, yeveá) may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel, unto the blood of Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar." There is certainly here (we are told) a grievous inadvertence; not, doubtless, on the part of Jesus Christ, but on the part of the evangelist who reports his words, and whose memory must have failed. know, from the Second Book of Chronicles, (xxiv. 21,) that this Zacharias, who was stoned by the Jews in the holy place, was the son, not of Barachias, but of

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Jehoiada. This is therefore an evident error. It does not affect doctrine, and cannot, in the slightest degree, be a ground of disquietude to our faith; but it suffices to show that the Inspiration could not have descended, as has been pretended, to the choice of expressions, or into the indifferent details of inspired narrations.

The answer is simple. We wish it were as easy to render it as short as it seems to us conclusive: we will give it at once, briefly. There is no reference here to the Zacharias of whom you speak; the evangelist has not therefore erred in not naming him, since he had him not in his mind. In fact, do you not see the incompatibility of such a supposition with the thought of Jesus Christ? What has he in view?-to recall the long catalogue of homicides of which an account would be exacted from the race of the Jews. And while he takes up their first murder before the flood, at the very portal of paradise, to make them responsible for it,would you desire that he should be content to refer, for the last, to a crime committed more than eight centuries before he spoke? He commences at the son of Adam, and would you imagine that he could conclude with the son of Jehoiada, and thus hold the Jews innocent of the blood shed during 873 years, the most shameful period of their history? Would it not have been more rational to commence, rather than to end, with this Jehoiada? Were not the Jews far more responsible for their homicides, committed in their last nine centuries, than they could be for blood which was shed before the deluge? Had they not, for instance, pursued and killed, with fearful fury, the prophet Urijah? (Jer. xxvi. 23.) "Which of the prophets (demands Stephen) have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which predicted the coming of the Just One." (Acts vii. 52.) There is therefore no reference to the son of Jehoiada in the passage of St. Matthew.

Our answer might terminate here; but it will doubtLes be asked, Who then was the Zacharias of whom

Jesus Christ spake? If we did not know this, it would not be a difficulty, and we might satisfy ourselves by replying: It was a righteous man whom the Jews slew, not only in the court of the temple as the son of Jehoiada, but "between the temple and the altar;" and this righteous man was the son of Barachias! The point, nevertheless, may be carried farther; for history enumerates to us two or three others of the same name, sons of Barachias (Βαραχίου or Βαρόοχου), about whom the opinions of learned men are divided.

The first was "a man of understanding in the visions of God," as he is represented in the Second Book of Chronicles (chap. xxvi. 5), and who, it is believed, is the person spoken of by Isaiah in his eighth chapter. (Hieron. in Isaiam, viii. 2; in the Septuagint, Zaxaρίαν υἱὸν Βαραχίου. However, he lived too short a time after the son of Jehoiada, for our objections against the one not to have equal weight against the other.

The second is the prophet Zechariah, son of Berechiah, and grandson of Iddo (Zech. i. 1), who came from Babylon with Zerubbabel, 325 years after the days of Jehoiada, and whose writings form the last book but one of the Old Testament. Scripture, it is true, has not recorded to us his martyrdom, any more than that of the other prophets, who were almost all persecuted and put to death.

The temple and the altar had just been rebuilt by his instrumentality, as by that of the prophet Haggai (Ezra vi. 14); and Zacharias, as it appears, was killed "between the temple and this altar." We read in the Targum, or the Chaldee Paraphrase of Jonathan Ben Uzziel, who, it is believed, was contemporary with Jesus Christ (Prolegom. of Walton, 12), the following passage, which proves to us that such was already, previously to the time of our Saviour, the tradition of the Jews concerning this prophet, who was indifferently called the son of Iddo and son of Barachias (Zech. i. 1; Ezra v. 1-vi. 14). The Paraphrast (Lam. ii. 20) in

troduces the "House of Judgment," answering to that lament of Jeremiah, "The priest and the prophet, have they not been slain in the temple of the Lord?" "Was it well of you to kill a prophet, as you did Zacharias, the son of Iddo, in the house of the sanctuary of the Eternal, because he endeavoured to reclaim you from your evil ways?" (Whitby on Matthew, xxiii. 35.) It may therefore be seen that Jesus Christ might remind the Jews of the sacrilegious murder of this prophet, the son of Barachias, son of Iddo, with which the prophecy of the Old Testament was to close.

IN CONNECTION WITH THESE SOURCES OF RASH CONCLUSIONS,-there is a rule which has not been sufficiently kept in view, and we will set it before our readers in the words of Peter Martyr:

"Although some passages may appear obscure, as respects chronology, we must be very careful of attempting to reconcile them by imputing faults to the inspired book. On this account, if it sometimes happen that we cannot clearly make out the number of years, we should simply confess our ignorance, and consider that the Scriptures express themselves with so much conciseness, that it is not always possible for us to discover at what period such or such a computation should be commenced. It often occurs that, in the history of the kings of Judah and of Israel, the respective number of their years is not easily reconciled; but these difficulties are explained and adjusted in various ways:-1. The same year commenced by one of the two, and ended by the other, is attributed to both.2. The sons often reigned with their fathers, during a few years, which are imputed sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other.-3. There were often interregnums, which Scripture sometimes annexes to the reign of the predecessor, and sometimes to the succes-4. Finally, it sometimes happens that certain years in which oppressive and profane princes have

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reigned, are looked upon as void, and therefore are not reckoned."

We conceive that the examples which we have already cited will suffice, and that we need not multiply their number. What we have said fairly indicates the weight which is due, generally, to the difficulties which are advanced; for we have been careful to review those of them which have been characterised as the most serious. Warned by these examples and by many others, let us learn, when henceforth we meet with any difficulty of the same nature, to think as did, sixteen hundred years ago, Julius Africanus, the friend of Origen, and as have done all the men of God who ́have lived before and after him: "However it may be

-(said he, in reference to the two genealogies of Jesus Christ which he had reconciled)-however it may be, assuredly the Gospel, in all and every part, speaks truly!" (Euseb. Eccles. Hist. book i. ch. vii.)

Errors contrary to the Philosophy of Nature.

It must be admitted (we are sometimes told) that though the apparent or real contradictions which are traced in the dates, quotations, and narratives of Scripture, are susceptible of removal by the resources of an explanatory review, more or less searching and laborious, yet that there are others which cannot be reconciled. These are, all those expressions in which the sacred writers present themselves in manifest opposition to the now better known laws of nature. Nevertheless (add they), if this argument is conclusive against the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures, it in no respect compromises the Divinity of their doctrines, any more than the truth of the important religious facts which they record for us. In inspiring his apostles and prophets, God's design was not to make us learned men, but saints. He could, therefore, without danger, leave the sacred writers to speak with ignorance of the phe